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Monday, January 7, 2013

Project House Update: Front Room Colors

Now that we've painted the majority of the easy rooms in the house (One day I'll post pictures of the updated guest room! Promise!), we're starting on the more complicated rooms. The rooms that need more than just paint. The one we determined to be the next easy is our formal living room, also know as the future playroom (waaaaay in the future).

Here are a couple of pictures the room, especially the most difficult feature of the room: the fireplace.

Each wall is a different shade of ugly brown and the fireplace is soooo stereotypical Southwestern that it makes me sad.

Dan and I both agreed that resurfacing the fireplace needed to be priority number one for this room. And in a miracle, we agreed on the type of stone we wanted to cover it in. It's a great blue/gray slate-y tiny rectangular tile that should be easy to wrap around the curvy fireplace (just below the mantel, above the mantel would be painted).

Additionally, with the color of the wood in the room (which we also want to cover the mantel in), I made a color board to see what color we should paint it. I pulled a bunch of colors from Design Seeds and made this! (It's in Paint, but I love Paint, so shut up!)

We decided that our favorites were the peachy tone (bottom center) and the green gray (top rightish). I went to Home Depot with my sister and we picked out five samples that we thought covered the spectrum of possible good colors.

Here they are on two different walls in the room to test it in different light.

Dan and I both agreed that we liked the color of "Silver Sage", the green gray color on the very left. However, it's just a bit too dark. We like "Winter Glaze", the barely-there light green second from the left, but it's just too subtle. And annoyingly, Behr doesn't really offer a color in between the two. Our plan going forward is to mix the two colors until we find a shade we like, paint it on a board, and get Home Depot to match it.

So we now know roughly what color we want the walls and ceiling (the ceiling will be painted white like every ceiling in the house, makes them look taller) and the stone on the fireplace. Now all we need to do is prep the electrical work for the changes we'll need to make to the lighting and we should be good to begin.

Hopefully the room will look something like this, with the sofa we now have in the great room, a new, bright ceiling fan, and the Star Wars prints my sister gave me for Christmas.